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New Books

In 1962, Elizabeth Bishop predicted that John Berryman would be "all the rage" in 100 years. His posthumous reception has been more complicated... more »

The notebooks of Camus offer an impressive array of aphorisms: "Withdraw completely and run your own race"; "Never talk about your work"... more »

Renaissance Florence is often associated with pioneering humanism — but consider the plight of its lowliest residents... more »

Murder on the Christmas Express, Murder Most Festive — what it is about the holiday season that makes readers want blood and gore?... more »

When Denis Johnson started to make money, he bought a sports car, painted it orange, and had “MANIAC DRIFTER” inscribed on its side... more »

The shift from “storytelling” to “content” is both a symptom of market forces and a sign of an aesthetic and epistemic pivot... more »

One day in 1800, a boy wandered out of the woods. Untrained in the ways of being human, he would settle a vexing philosophical debate... more »

Murder, sex, duplicity, betrayal — a new history of Suleyman the Magnificent has it all... more »

A Socrates gone mad. Diogenes, who wrote nothing that survives, was part hobo, part insult comic, part performance artist... more »

During the 1890s, astronomers were in a state of epistemic turmoil over the prospect of life on Mars. Turns out they saw what they wanted to see... more »

Edward Gorey’s macabre art is enigmatic, allusive, silly, somber, and haunted by the miseries of childhood... more »

Tolkien’s reading of Beowulf, and his ability to blend the epic with the novel, fiction and scholarship, shaped his sense of story ... more »

What explains the success of Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, and Kazuo Ishiguro? Publishers want literary fiction that looks like genre fiction... more »

Alice B. Toklas after Gertrude Stein. “Without Baby, there is no direction to anything — it’s just milling around in the dark”... more »

When Camus died in a car crash, he was carrying a return train ticket. "The greatest proponent of absurdism suffered an absurd death"... more »

John Updike produced upward of 25,000 letters in his lifetime, an almost exhaustive account of one man’s pleasures... more »

Francis Crick was no reclusive genius. He was loud and charismatic, a philandering poetry lover with an affinity for risque parties... more »

Want an antidote to both anti-science propaganda and reductive slogans in science’s defense?  Read philosophy of science... more »

Elias Canetti saw death as a cosmic offense, an intolerable humiliation. As he reframed Descartes, “I hate death, therefore I am”... more »

“Good literature and good gossip have in common that they are both savagely and mortifyingly honest”... more »

“I consider it most difficult to live with you.” Obsessed with suffering, teenage Arthur Schopenhauer alienated even his own mother... more »

Talk “unclever, unsophisticated, simple goodness,” advised Robert Frost, aka Mr. New Hampshire, spokesman for the old Yankee ways... more »

Werner Herzog, “the strangest of all living directors,” has also directed several operas and written more than a dozen works of prose... more »

Malcolm Cowley, who made American literature an identifiable movement, shaped a canon based on his tastes and convictions... more »

Updike on Updike: “I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.”... more »

Leah Libresco Sargeant argues that feminism should recognize “women as women,” not demand that they imitate men. What does it mean to treat “women as women”?... more »

Peter Singer’s “shallow pond” is less a thought experiment and more an extended gotcha exercise: “Caught you out, didn’t I, you bourgeois oaf”... more »

For guidance on 21st-century conundrums like polyamory and burnout, turn to the wisdom of 16th century nuns... more »

To understand modern individualism, consider late-18th century tea consumption and the engraved portraiture of French revolutionaries... more »

The reactionary radical Paul Kingsnorth fears a future in which the realities of human life — sex, death, environment — are negotiable... more »

Philosophers have often fastened on animals as emblems of the unknowable. Then there’s Kafka and dogs... more »

When Virginia Woolf met Gertrude Stein: "wheres the harm in this stupidish, kindly, rather amusing woman”... more »

For Leah Libresco Sargeant, feminism should treat “women as women" rather than demanding that they imitate men... more »

Seamus Heaney rarely struck a note of inspired weirdness. Then again, he was never as boring as some canonical poets... more »

Not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture. Is this progress?... more »

Wittgenstein’s self-recriminations: He was an ambivalent Jew, a brutal teacher, a bad soldier, an occasional masturbator... more »

For too long, Shakespeare has been regarded as a kind of minor deity. He was, in fact, a laboring writer... more »

Why do paranormal phenomena like precognition, telekinesis, and clairvoyance keep popping up in the most rational-seeming places?... more »

As an editor and writer, Malcolm Cowley had one aspiration: to raise the status of American literature... more »

Essays & Opinions

Affairs, authors using AI, and parties, both good and bad. Book-industry insiders dish on today’s literary world... more »

In the late 1500s, Europeans saw their time not as far short of classical greatness but as producing a culture of growth... more »

Nicole Eisenman’s paintings combine social realism, twisted art history, and trenchant observations about the art world... more »

Restorative justice presupposes that hurtful speech is inappropriate — and so it shuts down debate on sensitive topics... more »

Alison Gopnik: “Generative” AI is a summarizing machine, not a genuinely intelligent agent — like, say, a kitten... more »

Classical statues are beautiful, but painting them has gone horribly wrong. One theory as to why: Reconstructors are trolling us... more »

Terrence Malick's spell. Why his sensibility, visual style, and working methods had such a profound influence on other directors... more »

The term “religion” is both more recent and more complicated than you might expect... more »

Malcolm Cowley’s time at the helm of American literature was full of ambition and glamour. Our period, in comparison, is impoverished... more »

“Schadenfreude” is easy; but “as,” ‘like,” and “but” are hard. Every lexicographer knows it's the short words that are hardest to define... more »

Anthony Appiah: “I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life”... more »

“Schopenhauer wanted to outdo Hegel in intellectual grandeur, but his work has a cracker-barrel quality to it”... more »

Music can calm, soothe, and delight. It can also provoke, disturb, bite. And for that, you need dissonance... more »

In both medieval Christianity and Islam, the moon loomed as a potent symbol in versatile and radical ways ... more »

The loudest prophets of AI superintelligence are those building the very systems they warn against... more »

“What if the identity politics undergirding “left ‘cancel culture’” was always pretty much the same as the identity politics of offended Christians?”... more »

What was love in the 12th century? What was anger in ancient Egypt? We take emotions as universal and immutable — but what if they aren’t?... more »

Maybe you’ve mulled activism v. performative activism or masculinity v. performative masculinity. But what about performative reading? ... more »

We live in a state of epistemic anarchy. A return to elite gatekeeping won't work. Is persuading the misinformed our only hope?... more »

To understand the essential dramas of social and political life today, look no further than the strange and horny terrain of romantasy... more »

"Do not create a playpen on your campus for conservatives," says Robert P. George. "That’s not doing much for your students or for the cause of education"... more »

In defense of clichés. They are democratized wordplay, metaphors for the masses, ways to connect to readers with warmth... more »

Why is close reading having a moment? Because it asks students to take their own thinking seriously... more »

Dogs have a strict notion of fairness; tigers exact revenge. To hone our senses of virtue, egalitarianism, and morality, we can learn from animals... more »

Psychedelics had an unusual effect on Justin Smith-Ruiu. They became a gateway drug to Catholicism... more »

Christian Wiman: “If consciousness precedes matter, it’s a pretty good bet that it survives it”... more »

Few great visual artists are especially good writers. Eugène Delacroix was one of the exceptions... more »

Invention of the foodie. He “sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it”... more »

"For a long time now, the signature style of the contemporary art world has been something like real estate aestheticism — growth for growth’s sake"... more »

William Blake, Marxist revolutionary? His call to cast off the “mind-forged manacles” was one step toward utopian socialism... more »

Is the right path a full embrace of AI or a radical set of precautions against its widespread use? Both. Yascha Mounk explains ... more »

“What matters on a visit to Vegas is how much money you have, how much more you want, and how much you are willing to set on fire”... more »

Are ants sentient, and thus worthy of our moral concern? Objective answers are lacking — and so we turn to probabilistic approaches... more »

“How dumb are we?” asked an episode of Oprah in 1988. Part of the show’s offering: a debate between Gerald Graff and Allan Bloom ... more »

Today roughly half the countries in the world have a below-replacement fertility rate — and so David Runciman asks, “Are we doomed?”... more »

To Harold Bloom, he was an “American Proust.” To New York magazine, he was “THE GENIUS.” To himself, Harold Brodkey was a writer set for posthumous discovery... more »

"Globalization, among other things, is about people from anywhere reading about people from nowhere"... more »

John Searle was a leading light of American philosophy. He was also one of the sharpest analysts of campus revolts... more »

The late 1980s to the early 2010s, the post-theory and pre-wokeness period, was a golden age for the humanities... more »

Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win, Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s collaboration — it’s a glowing season for postmodernism... more »

That Plato was hostile to poets is dogma. But it is untrue, and the consequences have been severe. Elaine Scarry explains... more »

Americans spend about 17 minutes a day reading. As our literary culture deteriorates, repetition and cliché take hold... more »

We increasingly view human life in space as just a fantasy of the rich. But giving up on that dream would be a grave mistake... more »

Terry Eagleton unpacks Gulliver’s Travels, the rotundness of American police officers, and the problem of the sentimental liberal... more »

Mailer, Plimpton, Roth, Styron, Wolfe: At 93, Gay Talese dishes on his deceased contemporaries... more »

"A conservative by temperament, Thomas Mann became a defender of democracy because he was so alarmed by what German conservatism was becoming"... more »

The financial viability of serious literary fiction has been in doubt for over 40 years. And yet these books continue to be written, sold, and read... more »

The essential thing about The Brothers Karamazov is how it makes the reader feel, which is difficult to write about. Karl Ove Knausgaard tries... more »

Thirty years ago, a notorious hoax discredited Social Text. One of its editors is still making excuses... more »

Scrambling for relevance, humanists rush to write for outlets like Aeon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. That won’t save the humanities... more »